First-time founders start with a product. Fourth-time founders start with distribution.

Alphie is my fourth startup. My previous one, YouTeam (YC W18), was acquired by Toptal. Before that I built software for scientific conferences, launched Hubbub FM, a voice social network, ran a consultancy for small businesses, and even co-created a beekeeping championship -- the World Beekeeping Awards.

A solution in search of a problem

Most first-time founders fall in love with an idea. You put two things together and something beautiful comes out of that alchemy. The trouble is you didn't start with a problem, so you end up with a solution in search of a problem.

Dalton Caldwell and Michael Seibel cover this in Should You Follow Your Passion?. Paul Graham put it well in How to Get Startup Ideas: "Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas." The education system isn't designed to breed entrepreneurs. At school we were always presented with a problem -- nobody ever taught us how to find one.

Start with an audience

What I do now is start with an audience: people I know well and can easily reach. Then I look for a problem they have that I can actually solve.

This matters even more now. AI made building easy, and GTM got proportionally harder because there's so much more noise.

For us, the audience was founders. I'm one, I know hundreds of YC founders personally, and YouTeam had lots of YC customers. We started with a personal assistant, but everyone wanted something different from it. If we'd kept going, we'd probably have ended up building another Instinct, Grok Bot or Claude Duet.

The one thing everyone agreed on was needing customers. We'd had great results with inbound at YouTeam, and inbound is back because outbound is so crowded. But general inbound had too many points of failure, so we narrowed down to the lowest-hanging fruit: the qualified visitors already on your website. Now 9 out of 10 demos end with a customer signing up.

The audience is also your distribution

Starting with an audience also hands you your distribution channel. Your first 10 customers come from your network. You get into the meetups, where you see how people react right away and learn which message and language land. And if you've already worked in that space, you have the authority people need before they'll trust you and buy.

Then it's on to PMF, which is just retention.

First posted on LinkedIn